This is… not one of my stronger episodes. The original was less about condemning gamer culture and more about making the argument that any and all actions have some modicum of political value. I started with specific titles like Bioshock Infinite and GTA, then moved to more general games that didn’t necessarily intend to be political, and both of those are still in the video. But then I started referencing McLuhan’s whole The Medium Is The Message thing, arguing that making a game has its own intrinsic values vs. other mediums and means of self-expression. Then I tried to step back even further and look how one’s job, car, hobbies, clothing, eating habits, etc, all have political connotations and that escaping the political is all but impossible.

This quickly became a vague exercise in pointless philosophizing more than a diatribe about how people reacted to things like Carolyn Petit and Jim Sterling’s GTAV reviews or Feminist Frequency’s efforts. But I had 2.5 pages I really liked, and a page and a half that was kinda lame. So I surgeried the script to target gamers and gamer culture – and while I stand by what I said I can certainly see how the framing comes off as a bit strawman-y. Ah well.

(Also, Sorry about the video quality on this one. I screwed up creating the project in Premiere, finished editing it, realized that this version of Premiere has no way to correct the configuration error. A stupid mistake, but not one I seem to be able to meaningfully correct without re-editing the video which would take several days. Next video should, in theory, not look this horrible in motion.)

Script below the break.

It should come as no surprise that as games have grown in cultural influence they’ve also attracted a growing number of cultural and social critics. And as critics are wont to do, they… (well, okay, we) bring up issues with the game’s handling of women, of race relations, of the portrayal of LBGTQ characters and topics, of classism, and of culture at large.

And the responses from traditional quote-unquote “gamers” (which is a word I hate to use, but that’s another episode) are always the same: “Keep your politics out of my video games!” or “Oh Boy, another reviewer with an agenda!” And you see this a lot with the gamer community. They’ll bumrush Ebert or any other respected figure and insist they take games seriously as art. But as soon as anyone does try to take a game’s claims of artistic intent seriously by looking at the game’s content and meaning then suddenly the line becomes “Oh, they’re just games! Stop being so serious. They’re just for fun!”

Gamers want playing a video game to be a respected way to spend their time, they want to appear cultured for having completed highly praised titles; they want everyone else who ignores games to see how amazing and enrapturing and evocative a game can be. And there’s a naive optimism in that I can respect. I mean, I certainly see beauty and expressive potential in systems, if I didn’t I wouldn’t do this show. But that naive optimism is overshadowed by the tantrums thrown when gamers see the reality of games being taken seriously. They want to proclaim their hobby to be art with no strings attached. They want their games to be adulated without also being criticized. They want their games to be hard to play but not challenging to consume. They want they want games to have tremendous power, but without any responsibility. (Why does that sound familiar?)

And really this mentality is an extension of the games-as-boxed-product worldview that’s been adopted by… well, pretty much everyone when it comes to AAA titles. It’s what makes people outraged when a game like Grand Theft Auto V is given a 9 instead of a 10 because it “does everything right.” It’s also what makes people ask for so-called “objective reviews” that only look at feature sets and technical competence. It’s a consumer-goods perspective that suggests game writers should cover games the same way one would discuss toothpaste or socks. And game publishers are as complicit in promoting this view as much as anyone – between the yearly releases, the focus on features they can put on the back of the box, and the slick commercials aimed at specific demographic it often feels like games are marketed more like cars than works of pop culture. And from that warped world view the idea of keeping politics out of video games almost makes sense. No one test drives a sedan and then goes home and writes about the car’s troubling presentation of minorities or its oppressive heteronormativity.

But that’s the core problem with the “keep your politics out of my video games” argument. It presupposes video games are apolitical to begin with. Like they’re these wholesome, pure things that exist free from the taint of ideology or bias or viewpoint. They’re mathematical expressions or cartographical mappings of the world, and anyone dissecting them in a political or social or cultural context is just bringing their own baggage to the conversation. But that’s just absurd on its face – especially as many of the games that generate some of the harshest criticisms bring their own politics to the table. Bioshock Infinite uses racially charged imagery as a replacement for actually giving Comstock a reason to be an antagonist for the first half of the game. Can race relations really be an off-topic taboo for dissecting or discussing the game when the game itself keeps bringing it up? Grand Theft Auto V comments on sex and politics more or less constantly. In fact it’s kind of the core of the game’s supposed satire. It’s the Houlden Caufield of videogames, running around pointing out how everyone is a phony. In essence it argues for a sort of South Park centrism where everyone with strong opinions is wrong because people with strong opinions are easy to turn into lazy parody. The game skewers everyone in a lazy effort to be above the fray, but in the process it ends up punching down at vulnerable groups of people more often than it punches up at existing power structures. It’s kind of hard to keep politics out of games that openly invite such discussions.

But even in games that don’t seem to beg for political discourse, a discussion about the game’s politics can still be had. There’s certainly something to be said about the assumptions, say, Civilization builds into its simulations. Look at its winstates and what they value – technological progress, military conquest, economic superiority, and cultural domination. You don’t win by eliminating hunger or poverty or by nuclear deproliferation or by having a particularly high standard of living. You get it for, for lack of a better way to phrase this, very American goals. Winning the space race? Becoming a recognized world leader at the UN? Having a giant shiny army that can easily crush other civs? Cultural domination by so-called great works that get exported to the world? Civilization values what the culture that created it values, and while the game didn’t set out to be a political statement the way it systemized the world certainly presents one.

Or we can look at the recent release of SimCity. It clearly values dense urban cities over all other types of cities: not only do the game’s city size limitations and overall goals reinforce this, but the developers have said as much. It’s less interested in exploring cities of all kinds than it is in asking you to grind your way up to the sort of city it idealizes – a tightly packed skyscraper filled metropolis. In its view sprawling suburbia is just lazily wasted space, and an agrarian or rural city literally doesn’t exist.

And remember the debate everyone had about Spore and whether it presented a case for creationism or evolution?Or how The Sims defines modern life as a game of conspicuous consumption? Or how EVE online is sort of a Libertanian dystopia?

My point is that while the outward intent of these games isn’t to necessarily be political, you can definitely see how the viewpoint and values of the developers makes their way into these games, right? How we can have a political conversation about the implications of a game’s systems and metaphors and how they reinforce or challenge different political ideas? That by having these conversations we’re not bringing politics into the game but rather discussing the already extant politics of the game?

Well, even if you can’t agree to that it doesn’t really matter. Because it turns out that insisting that games generally don’t take a political stance is itself a political stance. It’s an argument suggests the apolitical is anything that doesn’t openly advocate anything in particular. Gamers think politics is invading discussion of games because they don’t see anything political about the way games are. They’re comfortable with the games that are currently being made and the messages games are currently sending out about culture and society. Subsequently they don’t see them as politically charged works but rather works that reflect their perceived reality. “Grand Theft Auto V isn’t misogynistic and transphobic, it’s just presenting the world as it really is, you know? Civilization isn’t a game about cultural, financial, and military imperialism, it’s just retelling the story of man. Bioshock Infinite doesn’t wrecklessly invoke racially charged imagery as a lazy shorthand for evil without justifying itself, it’s just referencing, like, an actual period in history where people thought that and stuff.” But reframing a game’s politics as “just the way the world works” is at best a poor apologia for a game’s political views, and definitely not a meaningful refutation that those ideas are in the text.

Politics isn’t some alien subject coming in and invading our precious games and games writing with its harmful presence. It’s already here. Hell, it’s been here, from the abhorrent racism of Custer’s Revenge to the Western jingoism of Call of Duty, from the anti-nuclear stance of Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power to the anti-nuclear stance of DEFCON, from the city planning assumptions built into SimCity to the city planning assumptions built into SimCity. Games are and have been political, carrying messages about the worldview of their developers whether they intended them or not. Does that mean every conversation about games has to be political? No, of course not! There are plenty of engaging discussions to be had about story structure, emotional impact, mechanic and system design, and tons of other stuff. But when someone tries to bring up a game’s politics – whether it’s in a review, a criticism, or simply a forum post or Twitter comment – the response shouldn’t be a childish meltdown about how games aren’t political and to stop taking things so seriously. To do so is to insist that games don’t have the capacity to be political. We can’t have it both ways. Either games are expressive and they need to be responsible for what they express, or they’re just games and of no cultural consequence. You know which way I lean in that debate. What about you?

30 Comments

October 13, 2013 at 9:07 PM

I find it rather fitting that you made a video about politics in games, while I’m currently taking government in my senior year. Anyway, I’m the type of guy to always see value to the things I watch, listen, play, etc. As a guy who agrees withe the ideas of Joseph Campbell, I believe there is always a subconscious message or theme in any piece of entertainment. I always want to make sure that I value everything I do, because we all know our time here isn’t long. Keep up the great work, Campster.

October 14, 2013 at 3:54 AM

October 14, 2013 at 7:45 AM

So uh.

1) Don’t like the stereotyping of “gamers” at the beginning. I think first and foremost it’s unfair to claim that “gamers” as a whole have any consistent opinion on whether games should be taken seriously as an art form, and you present zero evidence for the apparent schizophrenia that gamers possess when it comes to meeting criticism. It’s like making a broad claim about “blacks” or “rednecks” or whatever – why is it okay to do this with “gamers”?

2) Civilization’s messages inherent in its game systems are not necessarily “American” in nature. Rather, they are messages which are largely beneficial for any world power. Virtually every empire in history, not the United States alone, subscribes to the idea of domination through economics/culture/military/etc. In other words it really isn’t a bad example – especially considering the game if nothing else is a respectful celebration of diverse world cultures (just listen to the summary narrations for the individual civs).

3) Furthermore, while you don’t really ignore the issue of verisimilitude outright, you also kind of avoid mentioning that gamers often demand a degree of realism or at least believable context for their game mechanics and systems. I don’t know whether most games are built from the ground-up with their mechanics and systems, or have those inspired by their themes (probably a bit of both), but gamers demand that if they’re going to be doing X and Y that X and Y are presented in a way which is appropriate to the gameplay itself.

Of course, some games – like Grand Theft Auto – really have no connection at all between the overt political meanings and messages, and the game mechanics themselves – in GTA’s case I see it as much more of a cheap way of generating laughs than anything else.

4) The “games are apolitical” stance is one which is inherently political in itself, I agree – but your examples come across as obvious straw men. Example: “BioShock Infinite isn’t racist” is not a statement anyone is making. When we talk about race in BioShock we aren’t saying the game is racist or that the developers are racist, or whatever, because that makes no sense. Anyone who is actually discussing BioShock and race is doing so from your touted perspective – the one which you present as “correct”. Please stop putting words in the mouths of “gamers”.

I think the real problem is the gaming press as a whole, for jumping on and sensationalizing games’ political messages (intended or not) and presenting them in half-hearted ways that are more concerned with click-baiting than anything else. If you start with the statement “BioShock is racist!” then what kind of good discussion do you really expect to result? It’s like starting a debate with the supposition that one side’s mother is a whore.

Kotaku, Joystiq, IGN, even “respected” and “intellectual” sites like Polygon don’t give a crap about good discussion – they care about hits, and they care about ad revenue.

October 14, 2013 at 4:13 PM

October 14, 2013 at 6:19 PM

I was delighted to discover this video thanks to Anita Sarkeesian who shared it on Twitter. I think it’s very well done and your arguments are fair and well presented. I do feel it is a little general in the sense that there is really no way to determine how many gamers, or even if it is a majority of gamers who adopt the attitudes you are talking about. It is clear however that they are very loud. I shared the video and commented on it on my blog.

October 14, 2013 at 9:26 PM

I can’t say that Missile Command is political so much as it shows the futility of Ground Based Interception during the Terminal and Reentry phases of a ICBM launch. Which is not a Political talking point, but a Military reality most people are not prepared to handle.

If you really think that THAAD or Nike or Arrow or Sentinel or AEGIS/SM-3 or any other ABM system would truly work, you should really pay attention to how often these things fail when they’re being tested. And they’re generally tests against a single missile planned far in advance where every advantage is given to the interception system, which is nothing compared to a thousand missiles and ten thousand MIRVs plus decoys coming at it. Or ignoring the abysmal testing numbers, their actual combat percentages in the case of Patriot.

October 15, 2013 at 2:08 AM

October 15, 2013 at 10:49 AM

The whole thing about games as an art form but not as a political ground has some validity. Sure enough, art in the past has served as propaganda here and there, but that doesn’t mean that every piece of art HAS to be political. So, many gamers (or players, however you want to call them), decry that because many people seem to think that art and politics must go together to some degree.

I highly disagree with that.

I think it’s not that games can’t be taken seriously as an art form, but that people think that politics are something that are what can make a game “serious” is what’s wrong with the whole idea.

From my understanding, gamers and game developers want games to be taken as a serious art form on the bases of the world they’ve created that can be seen like a picture, the story that can be told like a book or a movie, and the music that can be heard. Politics aren’t the only thing that can be considered serious.

Moreover, if games have a primary focus to entertain above all else, what is the need to charge them with such heavy real-world topics? Some people enjoy them, sure, but does everyone? Not everyone enjoys having a political discussion when talking about their games.

So, really, “Keep Your Politics Out of MY Video Game (unless you like politics in your game, then put extra politics in your game if you want).” This because I don’t need YOUR politics in what I consider art.

October 15, 2013 at 11:47 AM

I feel like you have a few different distinct groups a people mixed up here and this argument really only applies to one of them. For example the title statement “Keep your politics out of my games”. Key words there are “Your politics”, It’s not a demand for apolitical games or critics else there would be no need for “Your”. That statement is a rejection of someone’s specific political agenda.

Even if someone is perfectly okay with politics and that specific agenda they may not want to have it pushed on them. Regardless of who is doing the manipulation and to what ends the manipulation itself repulses when it becomes obvious and incessant. This is especially true in mediums known for their escapism.

I think it is also necessary to acknowledge that the desire for games to be taken seriously as art is not shared by all gamers and that the value assigned to things deemed art by the general population is not a universal one. I think there is just too much variance here for a generalization to be appropriate.

October 15, 2013 at 3:48 PM

So – it would have been helpful if you had defined politics a little more explicitly, since it is one of those words that means different things to people depending on the context. Of course politics underlies much of what we do, so any art which portrays life will have some political assumptions or context. The same could be said for lots of things: philosophy, religion, etc. For instance pretty much every game relies on the belief that the appropriate use of violence restores order and brings freedom, and I have never, ever seen a game which deals with religion in any other than a rather adolescent fashion. On the other hand, should one use that as a critique of a work of art in it’s evaluation for a “score?” Should we diminish Der Ring des Nibelungen because Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite, megalomaniac and hopeless nationalist, or does Shakespeare get a 8.5 because he never placed a woman in the middle of a play?

Regarding politics in particular, a appreciate the notes on the Civilization games, since they are sometimes revered almost as an tool of analysis of human societies throughout history, rather than as an interesting tool to analyse the cultural values and beliefs of modern technocrats.

October 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM

2) It’s definitely an imperialist worldview, as opposed to any other alternate perspective of defining a successful civilization. The cultural dominance winstate suggests an American bias, as it wasn’t a universal goal of historical empires by any means, and wasn’t really seen as a possibility before the modern era. Communication was just too inferior to accomplish it. And tellingly, the empires that were best at internal communication (the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.) tended to be the ones least concerned with imposing culture–most of them actually adopted culture from conquered peoples. Meanwhile, civilizations with highly influential cultures–e.g., Greece and China–very rarely concerned themselves with educating “barbarians” until they were conquered by them.

3) Games still aren’t as realistic as film or television, and those are constantly held up for political scrutiny by cultural critics and audiences at large. Why should games, especially those that are striving for the same level of realism and shamelessly appropriating themes and imagery from film and TV be insulated from the same criticism?

October 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM

October 16, 2013 at 2:43 PM

“From my understanding, gamers and game developers want games to be taken as a serious art form on the bases of the world they’ve created that can be seen like a picture, the story that can be told like a book or a movie, and the music that can be heard. Politics aren’t the only thing that can be considered serious.”

Books, movies, and music get criticism and commentary on their political stances all the time, regardless if the author intended them or not. Because the people who create and critique those mature art forms understand that art is not created in a vacuum, and creators are going to bring their inherent cultural assumptions to the table, whether consciously or subconsciously. But it’s only among the “gamer” community that the notion that a work can be divorced from the culture that produced it is taken seriously.

October 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM

October 21, 2013 at 11:26 PM

I feel like saying “Video Games shouldn’t be required to have political message-mongering” isn’t really related to the idea that “Video games shouldn’t be critiqued on political or cultural grounds,” which I think is the claim that Chris is really talking about in the video. I mean, how many reviews of GTA5 commented that all three protagonists were unlikable people committing monstrous acts for insufficient justification? And how many comments on those reviews were people saying “I don’t care what you think about the characters, just tell us if the mechanics work.” It’s the issue of consumer advice reviewing coming back again – the game might be mechanically solid, but for the reviewer, the experience was ruined by his refusal to inhabit a monster. That’s not a mechanical fault, or even necessarily poor writing, it’s a conflict between the cultural values built into the game, and the cultural values of the reviewer. There may not have been explicit propogandizing about the reasons for violence or the types of things you have to do to hold on to security or upward mobility, but the way the game approaches these within its mechanics are determined in large parts by the values that the people making the game chose to put in it, and because it’s impossible to create a game that doesn’t simultaneously comment on and represent the culture it was created in, it’s nonsensical to say that games don’t have cultural messages worth criticising.

When Chris talks about the winstates of Civilization as being imperialistic, that’s not to say that Civ is outring propoganda in favor of imperialism, it’s saying that the game comes with some built-in imperialist assumptions, which might also carry some rather unsavory historical baggage. The culture the game was made in is reflected in the game, and likewise the game hints at a part of the culture that created it that we may not have considered. It’s part of the power that games (or movies, or visual arts, or any other cultural artifact) have to cast a mirror to the culture that created them. If we’re going to argue that games have the same power to reflect and comment on our culture, we have to acknowledge that because of the way this happens it’s impossible to create a game that doesn’t represent our culture, and with that acknowledge that sometimes, intentional or no, the cultural values and assumptions built into the games we play and make aren’t going to be very pretty.

October 25, 2013 at 2:28 AM

[…] “Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games” Errant Signal http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/They'll bumrush Ebert or any other respected figure and insist they take games seriously as art. But as soon as anyone does try to take a game's claims of artistic intent seriously by looking at the game's content and meaning … Posted by at 7:26 am Tagged with: Amazing Cake Art […]

November 1, 2013 at 3:12 PM

> ,,,realized that this version of Premiere has no way to correct the configuration error.

I know exactly what you mean. Select all (ctrl+A) on the old timeline, then copy (ctrl+C) the whole timeline. Create a new sequence with the correct settings, then paste the content in.

Was it the framerate or the resolution you got wrong the first time. Frame rate discrepancies may result in an occasional black frame, which can be easily fixed, and resolution discrepancies can be fixed with a single “paste attributes” or scaling function.

January 11, 2014 at 6:31 AM

They’re scared. They’re scared because they are children and even their parents don’t know how to discuss politics in a positive way.

Politics are a great example of the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach as Dad’s voice rises to boiling, Mum’s face turns to stone and you – trapped by the tension, with no idea how to fix it. Games are the escape.

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January 8, 2015 at 1:07 AM

February 19, 2015 at 3:45 AM

Not really sure who you are or how I am blocked from your twitter when I didn’t even know you until finding your video on Valiant Hearts (I too felt it was weird even though I’m typically more into just pure puerile enjoyment. If you divide the story from the game too much, I’m certainly going to lose interest in one. It was incredibly jarring. Takes better skill than that to pull it off. I wanted to know more about Karl and Emile, and Freddie was a terrible ‘token’ in many ways.I think 1 hour to each of the other characters and no Freddie would’ve vastly improved it)
Think major studios lost their ‘balance,’ in the PS1 era they were fine with doing odd experiments here and there, like Einhander and Vib Ribbon. But so much money is sunk into the major titles that they can’t afford to do that anymore. They’ve gone too far, similar to movie studios (ahaha, and now they understand why gamers were telling them copying hollywood was a shite idea) so those blockbusters NEED that extra marketing, because they NEED to break the bank to keep the studios afloat. So when they do get an idea that pushes some envelope or another, they can’t commit towards something that may alienate a demographic, or they’ll lose their shirts.
Anyway, from Valiant Hearts I watched a few of your other videos. Thought you hit Hotline Miami and War of Mine on the mark, but this was most a huge miss, because it compresses multiple groups of ‘gamers’ into one neat little strawman argument. Of course, it could just be you didn’t see a way to bring up these points without strawmanning. In actuality, everyone’s wrong. And right. The majority of the groups decrying politics in games play games without politics, or games where the politics are little more than a game mechanic itself (Grand Strategy, tactical infantry, commodity trading) while those bleeting about games not being taken seriously as art tend to be those who favour RPGs or narrative-driven FPS and adventure games. While there will always be overlap, the overlap isn’t so clear cut. It really IS possible to enjoy something like Metal Gear or Eve of Extinction or Silent Hill, and focus solely on gameplay, blazing through every cutscene. Some folk really are just there for the mechanics.
And, using Ebert as an example, Ebert was right and wrong at the same time his critics were right and wrong. Ebert did not seem to realise narrative games existed, and when he did…It turned out to be mostly (literal) kids angry at him. They recommended he look at things like Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and MAAAYBE one random Bioware title. Problem is, standard RPGs and AAA story games are written at the ‘young adult’ level to be more accessible, no matter the age rating at the bottom of the box. And Adults will treat the writing as such. Anyone that recommended something like Megaten got shot down ‘because it’s too Japanese, maybe he wouldn’t understand.’ Hel-LOOO movie critic, he watches foreign movies all the time. Absolutely NOBODY thought to bring up M rated adventure games like Phantasmagoria, Sanitarium, Rise of the Dragon, or I Have No Mouth for some inexplicable reason. Nobody mentioned The Dig. Nobody thought to mention near-storyless games where you make the narrative through your investigation, such as Starflight. (I wager: because they were too young to have even been around to experience them! This alone proves a majority of the ‘get politics out’ crowd didn’t get started until the SNES came out, then, due to their youth and inexperience, gravitated towards a particular sampling of games.)
An older gamer would, instead, say “Get the WRONG politics out of gaming.” We can determine whether something is improper, simply by way of saying “Was it ever presented in the game as anything other than a mechanic?” You shouldn’t talk about slavery in regards to uncharted waters. But you would for Freedom!. You shouldn’t want to rant about gun control in a game about shooting demons terrorising the planet. You shouldn’t want to talk about Coco Chanel collaborating with Germany in a game about owning a boutique. You shouldn’t want to shoehorn into a review about a small flash game about how computer ‘signals’ work factoids about Alan Turing’s mistreatment by the Crown. Yet those whom espouse the ‘wrong politics’ believe this ought to be brought up, every time, no matter how impolite or unrelated.
So you’re wrong that all games are political, because by the nature of mechanical systems, some simply can’t be. There are no political agendas pushed in The Incredible Machine of any sort, nor would there be any sequels had they tried. Nor is there any in most roguelikes like Nethack. “Sometimes a cigar, is just a cigar.”

However, and this is the thing that clicked most for me, and what sparked me writing this in the first place, however you are correct in that, if a game brings up political points, it had better damn well handle them correctly. Civilisation has always irked me that you can’t achieve a ‘win’ at ALL without satisfying certain bloody specific conditions. You know who else wouldn’t win at Civilisation? The Mongols. Because several of the nationstates they conquered, like Kiev, chose to become tributary states. There is no option to win by reducing everyone else to tributes, or by simply making so many pacts with everyone else nobody can move without sparking a world war. There is only Full Conquest. So the Mongol game would never end. It would have to end in an inevitable Game Over. The poor saps can’t even just get everyone else to call it quits for an end-of-game score tally early. Because that isn’t a ‘win condition’ even though you’ve conquered everyone else. This is what happens when you handle material improperly, or do not actually complete a satisfactory set of conditions and goals. Also some Endgame states are patently false. Winning the Space Race didn’t cause Russia to immediately discontinue their own research, nor was it directly involved in the collapse. They simply redoubled their effort to discover The Next Big Space Thing. Historically, the only true ‘win’ condition is that of a Golden Era of a Glorious Empire, of becoming a Recognised World Power, especially if you began from nothing.
Now, yes, the ‘game’ in real life continues on, but for a time everyone else says, yes, Rome/Egypt/Germany/Japan/Russia/America/France/Britain/Spain/turkey/Cordova/Persia/China/Mongolia/Babylon/Sweden/Peru/Mexico, you’ve won this round. This is where it should pop up the ‘end game or continue playing’ screen. Choosing to continue ought give no more than a ‘historical check’ meaning you won that ‘age,’ but of course, someone else can always win the next. This is why I only play the third, as there are innumerable mods centered around fixing this, as well as making the tech tree more realistic. Paradox has less win conditions, but they are based on a more sweeping global changes. Vastly prefer Paradox, especially after Victoria II.

…Actually it’s good that I was blocked on twitter now I guess. I would have spammed you to death with that ramble.